There is a lot to take away from Ron Heifeitz and his notion of adaptive leadership. Heifetz describes technical vs adaptive (wicked) problems and uses the concept of the holding environment to facilitate adaptive work.

The idea is this. Without some sort of ‘heat’, the organisation will stay with the status quo. But turn up the heat too fast, and there will be chaos, confusion and pullback (wicked problems symptoms). The holding environment is all about keeping the heat enough to push people out of their comfort zone just enough to prevent chaos. This is known as the productive range of distress (although many other metaphors exist)

Now I do SharePoint projects mainly and I have found that art to intranets is to create and maintain this sort of holding environment. it has very little to do with technology either.

I write about these topics here:

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/04/11/why-do-sharepoint-projects-fail-part-1/
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/02/12/the-one-best-practice-to-rule-them-all-part-1/
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/10/the-practice-of-dialogue-mapping-part-1/
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2009/09/30/folders-are-bad-and-other-urban-legends/

regards

Paul

It is not surprising to see this blog post from ThoughtFarmer, a company that produces a social, enterprise wiki-based intranet product. The social and wiki nature of the product offers many more opportunities for affecting organizational culture than a more traditional intranet based on a CMS, document management, or simple web-page generation.

From the start of our own intranet project we saw that while implementing a new intranet required offering a new visual design, the intranet could substantially influence a culture shift. I recently heard Andrew McAfee say that while effective use of Enterprise 2.0 technology is more about organizational culture and management than anything else, simply implementing social, open technologies can be the tip of the wedge of a culture shift. Enterprise 2.0 technology like ThoughtFarmer can catalyze culture transformations in the right circumstances (though it can rarely cause much of a culture shift all on its own).

The intranet problem should be understood as crossing multiple design genres and problem definitions and should touch heavily upon issues of organizational development (OD). Organizations ARE complex social systems and the artifacts of the organization play an imiportant role in setting the tone for culture and interpersonal relationships. Just as an office’s design and decor will influence the work environment, so too will an intranet’s visual design, information architecture, social tools and publishing model.

It is helpful to see even an intranet implementation project itself within the context of a complex social system. Actively engaging organizational constituencies throughout the process of producing a new intranet not only builds stronger shared ownership of the end-product, but actually sets a tone for use of the new intranet.

I look forward to future posts on this topic and hope to see this particular post garner a lot of comments!